The present invention relates generally to paging systems and, more particularly, to paging terminal apparatus which, in cooperation with paging receivers with acknowledge back capability, provides an automatic or selective page forwarding service at the election of the pager user.
Present day paging systems are efficient, sophisticated in technology and serve well large numbers of users. As a result, such systems are relied upon more and more to reach particular individuals wearing such paging receivers and deliver critical and urgent messages. Unfortunately, it cannot always be guaranteed that such messages for particular pagers will in fact be received when initially sent or intended. In the past, paging messages were sent without knowing whether users received them as intended or not. One way to overcome this, of course, is to request the pager wearer to call back the originator on the telephone to so advise him. One prior art system addressed the problem by simply periodically transmitting a message until the specific pager user called a particular telephone number to indicate receipt thereof so that the continuously transmitted message could be terminated. However, unless the particular pager user in fact calls the necessary telephone number, and even though it may have been received, the message continues to be periodically sent expending, and most certainly wasting, valuable system capacity.
Another approach has been to provide the paging receivers themselves with an acknowledge back capability which is activated, either manually or automatically, whenever their particular address is received and properly decoded. This assures that the pager is working satisfactory and that the originator may be notified with a good deal of confidence that the message was very probably received as intended. No specific action on part of the pager is necessarily required.
The above, of course, provides a substantial step towards assuring confidence in the reliability of the paging system. However, it does not address the problem regarding those instances in which acknowledge back is not perfected. It will readily be understood that the pager may be inoperative, the user may be out of effective signal range, or the pager may have been, accidentally or intentionally, turned off. Nevertheless, there are instances in which it is deemed imperative that the intended pager user be reached in one way or another. In the past, this type of emergency or otherwise demanding situation usually has resulted in the paging originator being forced to find some other pager user to notify and request he or she contact the non-responding user with some specific message. While this alternate plan of reaching the intended pager user may well be the only option available to the page originator, it has nevertheless been on a rather hit-or-miss basis and, in any event, has proven to be very inconvenient and time consuming for all concerned. The originator must find the identity of another pager user that can respond, then find that person's pager ID, cause the page to be sent, and then wait for the hoped for response.
A more convenient and reliable arrangement is therefore needed to improve response time and alleviate the burden to system users.